Vince DeFalco, owner of Comanche Cycles in Moorpark, takes out his motorcycle. He is helping out people by fixing bad bikes theyâve bought and getting them back on the road. Vince DeFalco, owner of Comanche Cycles in Moorpark, takes out his motorcycle.

Vince DeFalco, owner of Comanche Cycles in Moorpark, works on fixing bikes and getting them back on the road.

Evan Mettlen, (right) mechanic for Comanche Cycles in Moorpark, has been working on Joseph Avendanoâs custom bike. Vince DeFalco, owner of the shop, is helping people who have hard luck bike stories.

Comanche Cycles only intended to fix 1 bike for free, but couldn't turn down about dozen others

MOORPARK, Calif. ? It seemed more than just coincidence when Vince DeFalco, owner of Comanche Cycles in Moorpark, received that particular phone call the very moment he hit the "post" button on his shop's Facebook page.

DeFalco, 50, was on the popular social media site posting his second request for Comanche Cycles' "We Want to Fix Your Bike for Free" campaign when he got a call from Joseph Avendano, a Fillmore man he hadn't heard from in more than three years.

Avendano, now 30, had first come to DeFalco in 2010 after another Ventura County shop ? which has since gone out of business ? spent a year and $20,000 of Avendano's savings to create a custom 9-foot V-Twin chopper. Its engine blew up almost as soon as he brought the bike home.

"It was never fully functional. It kind of ran, and then it stopped running, and I took it to Vince to get an estimate to get it back on the road," Avendano said. "There were a lot of mismatched things that shouldn't have been together."

According to DeFalco, it was a good thing the motor stopped working, because the chopper was so poorly constructed, Avendano could have been seriously hurt. Avendano, who used his life savings to create his dream bike, once again had to start saving money for the rebuild, finally calling DeFalco 3Â½ later.

DeFalco, who paid a $15 ad fee to Facebook to share his request for hard-luck stories of motorcycle builds gone bad, told Avendano to send him an email, which he'd consider along with about 100 others he'd received from bilked bikers from across the country.

"All the biker shows on TV sort of increased the awareness of bikes and put a lot of guys back to work in this industry ? machinists, welders, aerospace workers. It definitely created a huge influx of capital because everyone wanted to be a biker," DeFalco said.

He said the downside was that many motorcycle shops opened with inexperienced owners who'd never worked in the industry and didn't understand the business or the bikes. Inevitably those shops closed, leaving just a few to deal with the aftermath.

Some of the bad bikes brought to Comanche Cycles needed up to 40 hours of work, and, with a shop rate of $100 per hour, DeFalco often found himself lowering the price to a flat rate that was considerably less.

"I noticed this pattern that we were always trying to help people out," DeFalco said.

That's when, this past February, he got the idea to pitch a free rebuild on Facebook for one lucky motorcyclist. The problem was that, out of the many emails and phone calls he received, he could only whittle the list to about a dozen bikers, including a single mom in Wisconsin and a disabled Vietnam veteran in New Mexico.

That's when he realized he couldn't pick just one and decided to rebuild all the motorcycles that made the shortlist, starting with Avendano's.

"Joe's bike is the worst I've ever seen in the 13 years I've been in this business," DeFalco said.

His mechanics already have put 100 hours into it, dismantling it and rebuilding it from the ground up, with an estimated $9,000 in parts alone. One of DeFalco's suppliers, Custom Chrome in Morgan Hill, is helping out by giving him a reduced price on parts, plus extra time to pay for them.

For Joseph Avendano, the fact that DeFalco made his bike the first in his series of rebuilds is an incredible gift.

"There's a part of me that still doesn't believe it's actually happening, and it's really awesome that he's doing it," Avendano said. "I feel very fortunate. He's going to do it right."

Comanche Cycles needs to continue its regular business to stay afloat, so fixing bikes for free will be a slow process, and the sequence of individual projects is entirely at DeFalco's discretion. Still, he said he's open to more hard-luck motorcycle stories, so bikers should email him at comanchechopperrescue@gmail.com.